Google acknowledges problems with site: query

I've had two sites lose indexed pages. One of them is really small, but all the newer content-rich pages have disappeared, so it's not a duplicate issue. Nothing that Matt Cutts mentioned so far seems to fit this site. It actually doesn't do badly for links either. The only thing I can figure is that it's one of my newer sites, so its links in are also fairly new. The same is true for the other site of mine that was affected.

So from the experience of my own sites, I have to agree with Minstrel. Something looks broken, or at least isn't making much sense.

Just a random stab in the dark: is this deindexing affecting sites that have obtained links from other sites that have low traffic? In other words, are Google using toolbar data to judge the value of an inbound link, and discounting those links that show low traffic?

 

Doing that wouldn't make a lot of sense to me although it's possible.

I don't believe Google is stupid or crazy. I don't really believe they have this mess on their hands because they don't know what they're doing. I think they tried to do something big (as in BIG Daddy) and something they didn't anticipate when badly awry - and either they don't yet know what caused it or they don't yet know how to fix it or whatever it takes to fix it is a major job that is simply taking a long time (e.g., hardware issues).

I'd be happy if they'd just admit it's a mess and let us know they're trying to fix it, like the sitemaps team sort of did, instead of trying to snow us and claim it's all because of black- or gray-hat SEO.

 

so finally, they accepted it

 

Man, this is annoying. With the current situation I cant get motivated to do any work on my site.

 

Yah check this graph of one of my sites which mainly got its traffic from Google look at the stats over the last 30 days and the recent fall with the indexed pages fall...



I'm pretty pissed and dissapointed the site was extremely stable as you can see from the graph

Lets see what happens

Emil

 

Nice graph emil...what program are you using to generate that?

 

StatCounter

 

Thanks for sharing and I agree with most comments that something has gone very bad and they are in the dark for now.

Here is my concern: not only we will lose traffic and revenue from serps due to (de)indexing mess and a whole lot of backlinks aswell. So why all the effort if pages with our backlinks are disappearing? This can cause many PR and serp drops. Maybe a conspiracy to get us drawn to AdWords hehe I just hope they get it fixed asap as this index-drop is costing us webmasters a cajillion.

cheers

 

I suspect the whole BIG bit means this time they altered a whole bunch of different factors at once, and this is what is causing so much confusion. I don't think they're in a position to make changes one at a time, the way you would normally write a programme, because they don't want to risk SEOs figuring out their secret sauce.

My speculation with the toolbar data affecting links is because Brett Tabke dropped some big hints that this has been in use for some time. Not that he works for Google, but you'd think he knows more than most. Although there's some kind of patent, I believe, that stops Google from using toolbar data directly to affect ranking.

 

That graph shows the affects this is having on people incomes. Has anyone seen this issue in any main stream press articles? Why aren’t any business federations asking google questions or discussing loss of revenue with the media?

 

Exactly. If you change a few lines of code in a program or web page script and it doesn't work, no big deal - you change it back. But if you rewrite the entire program and it doesn't work, you usually have invested way too much to just throw it away - you start debugging it - and that can be a long and arduous process. I think that's where they are now.

No. HE thinks he knows more than most. But then Brett Tabke has been a legend in his own mind for a long time.

 

Isn't this the same guy that banned all SE's about six months ago via robots.txt only to change his mind about a month later after his site lost about 50% of its visitors?

 

Pages de-indexed...thats scary.

Only thing which makes me happy is, i thought I'd just hit the sandbox in a big and mixed up way.

Good to know we are all in the same boat! The frightening thing however is we are subject to googles harsh seas, and sadly I'm not sure if anyone's paddling for us.

Google has probably received a million emails about de-indexing this week.
Well now it's a million and one because I just finished sending big G my sos email, because simply de-indexing all our pages (except our home pages) means our barb wire canoe is sinking rapidly, and I can't swim!!

Diversify in marketing & traffic stragtegies? Give me a break, webmasters rely heavily on their search results. We make sites, we spend money on their adword systems, we literally are the reason why results show up when people use there search engine. Without us, their would be no need for site searching systems, there would be no sites to index!

Lets hope they Re-Index ASAP! (Courtwins aren't running in there favour lately.)

 

If a lot of us are loosing indexed pages and see a huge decrease in traffic because of that -- then who is winning? --

I bet Google is loosing money because of this too.

probably also the reason why they are not informing us about it.

even if it did result in better search results Google will do something about it. They are not just about good search results. They are smarter than that

Things will clear up. In time

mho

 

Not sure they are losing money. There are still the same # of searches a day, so they land on someone elses page with adsense. They make money either way.

They would only be losing money if only all/most adsense sites were hit and non-adsense sites were not hit.

 

I hate to be the one to defend Matt Cutts, but:

Nintendo and I have both seen changes in this, so it may simply take some time for all sites to see changes. I do wonder what the blog meant by 'punctuation' however... and how it might affect filenames - ie question marks, equal signs and etc.

Can anyone with more than one hyphen in the domain name see changes at this time?

You should perhaps compare allinurl:www domain.com to site:www domain.com to see how badly you may truly be affected by de-indexing.

 

OK. So how are you defending Matt Cutts? Or how is what he said accurate? He's claiming that by May 6 part of the problem was fixed and that by May 13 the rest of the fix would be in. He also goes on in that blog to look at the issue of pages dropping out of the index, blames it on shady linking practices, and claims THAT problem is also fixed. BS. There are many sites with no shady linking practices that are affected and the damn problem is not even close to getting fixed.

Now, the Sitemaps groups is admitting to continuing problems on May 19 or 20, though Cutts is claiming a couple of weeks earlier that the problem is fixed. And now it's May 21 and there are still major problems.

I may be easy to fool at times but I know a smokescreen and a bafflegab exercise when I see one.

 

Here is a bit of a hilarious thing um you say you have site pages drop ok I have this site with 4 thousand pages, google site shows over 13,000 or so lol explain that one.

 

So is anybody seeing signs of improvement?

Also anybody know a tool that shows indexed pages by DC? I found it once then lost it...

Emil

 

I do agree, it is alot of smoke and mirrors. But the one thing I did come away with that was handy, since I recently started a site with a hyphenated domain that was being crawled like hell but not indexed, was the part about hyphenated domain names... and then the site jumped over 10,000 pages from less than 800.

I have a real love/hate relationship with Google, and it is extending to Matt Cutts. ("I hate to be the one to defend Matt Cutts") But you also have to wonder what he is privy to, since he had no idea that the crawl caching proxy servers were online from the start of BigDaddy, and if they are keeping him in the dark on that... what else?

The blog you started this thread over is dated the 19th, the Indexing Timeline was posted the 16th, he states there was a quick fix in place that I can confirm, and that "...a full fix for site: queries on hyphenated domains in supplemental results expected this week."

What bothers me about Vanessa Fox's posting is "Some particular ones you may have noticed" and "site: queries for a domain with punctuation" (the example gives a hyphenated domain). I can't see how this would not affect filenames, and a serious decline in urls with "?" and "=" in them. And where else might this problem have been duplicated? Crawling? Caching? Indexing?

What is it we did not notice?